(RHSA-2017:1499) Important: ansible security update

Ansible is a simple model-driven configuration management, multi-node deployment, and remote-task execution system. Ansible works over SSH and does not require any software or daemons to be installed on remote nodes. Extension modules can be written in any language and are transferred to managed machines automatically.

Security Fix(es):

• An input validation vulnerability was found in Ansible’s handling of data sent from client systems. An attacker with control over a client system being managed by Ansible, and the ability to send facts back to the Ansible server, could use this flaw to execute arbitrary code on the Ansible server using the Ansible server privileges. (CVE-2017-7466)

• An input validation flaw was found in Ansible, where it fails to properly mark lookup-plugin results as unsafe. If an attacker could control the results of lookup() calls, they could inject Unicode strings to be parsed by the jinja2 templating system, resulting in code execution. By default, the jinja2 templating language is now marked as ‘unsafe’ and is not evaluated. (CVE-2017-7481)

These issues were discovered by Evgeni Golov (Red Hat).